


The Hand That Mocked

by bellepeppertronix



Category: Alien Series, Mass Effect, Prometheus (2012)
Genre: Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-11
Updated: 2013-07-20
Packaged: 2017-12-19 03:11:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/878736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellepeppertronix/pseuds/bellepeppertronix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The crew of the Normandy intercepts a distress signal from a small planetoid, LV-228. When they arrive, they find a derelict ship and ruins unlike any other that have ever been seen in the galaxy. And inside the ruins...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Distress

“Commander, we have an emergency hail coming in,” Joker said.  
Shepard was standing behind him on the bridge, scowling down at a tablet. She’d been half-talking to him and half-reading a dossier on a rather unsavory bunch of krogan mercenaries—amateurs, obviously—who had left a mile-wide swath of pissed-off gangs who they’d stolen guns from. They’d been spotted running the (no doubt thrice-pilfered) guns from Citadel space out into the Traverse, to buyers unknown. When Joker had started talking, she looked up at what was on his console monitor.  
"Where from? LV-228? That's in human space," she said. "Far out, but reachable. We don't even need to use the nearest relay."  
"Yeah, and lucky for whoever sent this distress hail. The signal's pretty degraded; looks like the poor unlucky SOBs have been out there for awhile." Joker mumbled.  
"Hm. So…how fast can you get us there?"  
"Uh…probably two hours? If I drive full steam ahead?"  
She thought for a second about the krogan gun-runners, who in all likelihood were just low-grade crooks, and who were at least one relay-hop away.  
"Yeah, get us out there. Pedal to the metal," Shepard said. "Let her have her head. Stretch her legs."  
"Commander...are you giving me carte blanche to..."  
"Run us over there, Joker. That's not a suggestion," she said, and left smiling.

The planetoid was unremarkable--a wind-lashed rock with a half-formed atmosphere, rocky landscape punctuated with low hills and valleys. It was cold, with temperatures ranging from slightly above freezing during the daytime and subzero at night.  
"Sounds like a helluva place to have a picnic," Joker said, once Shepard finished the briefing.  
"Lucky you, getting to stay up here and keep your toes all nice and toasty," Ashley said, grinning at him.  
"Hey, I like my fair share of voluntary discomfort as much as the next guy," he countered. "Just ask the Commander how many sleepless nights I spend, hunched over my pilot's console."  
"Joker, you and I both know that I'd have to pry you off that console with a crowbar, even IF you fell asleep there." Shepard countered.  
Joker shrugged elaborately; Ashley, Garrus, and Tali laughed behind their hands.  
"Anyone want to guess what's even better than a picnic on a frozen, desolate wasteland of a planet?" Shepard asked.  
Everyone looked at her strangely; she continued, with a completely straight face, "A Mako ride! Over partially-frozen ground and hills composed of..." she glanced back at her tablet, "sharp, jagged rocks and cracked sheet-ice!"  
Everyone tried not to look crestfallen or too nervous, and she couldn't hold it in anymore. She laughed aloud.  
"Come on, everyone! Looks to me like it's a simple run-of-the-mill rescue mission. They've probably got broken or defective heating coils or a bad core accelerator. We run down there, help them patch up, and that ought to be it. Should be over in a bit." She paused and looked around at them, biting the inside of her lower lip.  
"So...I'm thinking I should pick the away team. Unless you all want to draw straws?"  
Joker raised his hand.  
Shepard, and everyone else, looked at him with various expressions of amused disbelief.  
Joker said, "Can I be exempt on the grounds of, yanno, needing to make sure the Normandy doesn't go plummeting out of the sky?"  
"When have you ever been assigned on an away mission?" Ashley laughed.  
"Well, just in case," Joker hedged.  
"I'll go," Garrus said. "You said the distress call came from a turian vessel, didn't you?"  
"That's what it looked like," Joker said.  
"Thank you, Garrus. Now," Shepard said, and raised an eyebrow as she looked over the rest of the crew. "Who wants to be the second person to come and have their bones rattled?"

"There she is," Shepard said, and Garrus strained against the harness of his seat inside the Mako, struggling to see what she saw on the vid-screen.  
There was a turian ship standing beside one of the low, rolling hills, its gray-black hull marked, but the markings so weathered they were all but illegible. Even from that distance he could see there were a handful of large shipping crates outside the vessel, the commercial type with roll-tops that could be password-locked. Around and on top of everything, drifts of thin, gritty snow had built up--not enough to be an environmental issue, not really--but he gauged it was at least a few days' worth.  
He shifted uncomfortably in the seat.  
"Any indication of damage?" Kaidan asked.  
"None as far as I can see," Shep said.  
They pulled up alongside the ship, the Mako's recalcitrant brakes juddering them forward three times before they came to a final stop.  
He climbed out last, glad his exoskeleton was intact and his internal organs hadn't been shaken into a pulp--at the very least, this part of this planet had a better terrain than most places they'd tried to set down.  
"It's a mining vessel, an older type of the kind used near Palaven. They must be having some sort of internal technical issue," Garrus said. "Probably a bunch of rookie miners on their first dig..."  
Shepard nodded and made a satisfied noise. She checked her guns and adjusted her helmet in silence.  
"Let's see why they need help. All right?"

The turian ship was smaller than the Normandy, and more compact: their airlock opened up into a stiff, humid interior where the temperature immediately had Shepard sweating and Kaidan shifting uncomfortably in his suit as his scalp prickled with the heat.  
"Oxygen supply doesn't seem compromised," Shepard said. "All right, I think it's clear to remove helmets."  
But the moment they did, they wished they hadn't; the stifling air was fetid with the odor of decay.  
While they were all standing around trying not to gag for the first minute or so, Shepard pursed her lips and forced herself to try and concentrate.  
"Something tells me the smell doesn't bode well," Garrus mused.  
"You aren't going to start talking in rhyme all the time, are you?" Kaidan asked.  
"What?" the turian asked, and gave Kaidan such a blank look that Shepard turned away, biting her lip to stop from laughing.  
"Gentlemen," she said.  
"Sorry, Commander."  
When she turned away again, Garrus continued, "If they were performing a terraforming study, they might have a compost laboratory onboard that could explain the...aroma."  
"Huh," she heard Kaidan reply.  
The ship's fore-deck was deserted. They moved quickly through, finding nothing but more crates--some overturned and scattered around. Inside a few there were cylindrical specimen canisters--metallic ones made of high-carbon stainless steel, and a few made of high-end borosilicate laboratory glass. They contained a milky yellow-green liquid. Shepard knelt and was studying one of the boro-glass canisters, reaching to pick it up before Kaidan spoke.  
"Awfully quiet," Kaidan said.  
A moment later they both jumped and had their guns up and ready, trained on--Garrus, who was standing beside one of the crates, his gun aimed at something on the floor.  
"...Commander, I'm not sure what I'm looking at. You're an engineer, correct?"  
"Yes..." she hedged, and stepped closer.  
"So...does that look like a corrosive burn to you, too?"  
He was aiming at a spot on the floor, where the paneling had been melted away in a messy puddle, exposing wiring beneath it.  
She made an interested--and disgusted--noise. "Whatever spilled must have been some powerful stuff. Looks like it went through all the layers of plating and clean down to the insulation," she muttered.  
"You think it's some of that stuff?" Kaidan asked, pointing at one of the canisters.  
"Seems likely, but...whatever that is, it...I've only ever seen acids of that grade in laboratories, in tightly-controlled environments. What the hell were these people doing with the stuff?"  
Garrus shrugged; Kaidan shook his head. Shepard bit her lip.  
"Let's keep moving. I'd like some answers."  
The bridge was deserted, the flight computers still online and coordinates partially set.  
"They were expecting to go somewhere," Kaidan said.  
"They didn't," Garrus pointed out.  
Shepard maintained her own silence. They had been aboard derelicts before, as well as vessels that had been overtaken by pirates. This situation felt like neither. She half-expected a rush of husks at any moment--even began to wish for it, as something was clearly wrong.  
She tapped a few things on the console, her in-helmet translator unscrambling the dense turian alphglyphs into something she could read, and after a moment she brought up the ship’s internal comm-frequency channel.  
“Time to see if anyone’s home,” she said.  
She pressed the mic button, and held it, speaking slowly and clearly. "Hello? This is Commander Shepard of the Normandy, Alliance fleet. We recieved an emergency hail. Is anyone currently aboard?" she called.  
They heard distant echoes of speakers around the ship scattering her message, the turian translators picking it up almost instantly; but the padded walls caught her voice and held it.  
"Doesn't seem like anyone heard," Kaidan mused.  
"Was worth a try," she said.  
Deeper in, the ship was still and silent. As they walked, the intensity of the stench kept ratcheting up, until they all had to stop for breath.  
"...on the record, I think we should don helmets again due to..." she paused, scowling against the smell, "...potential exposure to aerosolized bacterial biohazards."  
They chorused agreement; everyone pulled their helmets back on.  
There were a trio of quiet hisses and clicks as their suits' airlocks engaged. She stood a moment, gratefully breathing recycled filtered--and thankfully odorless--air.  
When she turned, she saw Garrus staring at the wall she'd been leaning against.  
"Something the matter, Vakarian?"  
"The lights have been on awhile," Garrus muttered.  
Shep flicked her eyes at him, one eyebrow raised. "How can you tell?"  
He gestured at the wall with his rifle, where a vertical lightbar hummed softly in its socket.  
"Flutters start up if you don't let those kinds of filaments recharge. But that takes some time; days, weeks, even, for the higher-end ones."  
They stood for a moment in a long, narrow corridor where, to one side, exosuit hangers lined the wall. All but one exosuit had been taken.  
"Looks like they're out," Kaidan said quietly.  
"Or that there's a place somewhere onboard with a compromised hull or oxygen leak. All right, let's move. See what we can see," she said.  
She was trying to fight down the feeling of wrongness. Visions of skeletal people, corpses with electricity sparking from their mouths and their eyes, flashed and died before her.  
She swallowed, and clenched her fists.  
They walked down the hallway, to the end, where a pair of blast doors slid open with a faint hiss of bearings gliding in their casings: this opened into a central room dominated by dozens of the white roll-top shipping crates, as well as several steel-plated tech-crates.  
"This is the cleanest mining ship I’ve ever seen," Garrus said.  
"Doesn't look like they were equipped to do much digging at all," Kaidan offered, "There's no equipment, no crane, nothing..."  
Shepard didn't say anything. She walked around a few of the crates, listening, hesitating.  
There was no digging equipment, as far as she could see. Suspended from the fretwork of the rafters were more white shipping crates, these obviously empty.  
At the far end, the door was jammed, opened just a crack. Someone had shot the door control panel clean off the wall, and left nothing but a melted knot of wires where it had been.  
She froze.  
"Look," she said.  
Garrus came up behind her first, silent, and aimed without saying anything.  
"What do you think?" she whispered.  
"Don't know," he said. "Could be anything. Pirates. Mercenaries. Mutiny."  
She nodded, and pulled her own shotgun over her shoulder. Kaidan followed them, mute, his eyes narrowing behind his helmet's visor.  
They crept closer to the door, to where they could see just through it, into another corridor. There, the light panels in the walls flickered, dull one moment and bright the next, and she grit her teeth. She hated fighting in reduced visibility.  
"Doesn't look like we can open it from here," she whispered.  
"I'm on it," Kaidan murmured, and there was a faint blue glimmer along the insides of the doors. In a moment the doors shifted, the workings groaning softly, until finally they slid open.  
They stepped through rapidly, their footfalls making soft ticks against the floor paneling. This corridor slanted lightly downwards; the walls on one side were made up of a bank of lockers with clear doors, some obviously containing clothing and gear.  
She held her gun in a knuckle-creaking grip and padded around, sweeping corners, checking the three doorways: three more blast-doors, all closed.  
She chose the far right.  
And they looked down the corridor as the rows of light-panels activated, throwing the room into stark relief. Everything was sterile and white, so bright after long minutes in the darkness that it stung her eyes.  
"This is definitely the cleanest, smallest, tidiest mining ship I've ever seen," Kaidan said.  
"This is definitely not a mining ship," Garrus replied.  
They moved into another room, full of bolted-down metal tables laden with specimen jars, transparent storage casks, sample tubes. Several of the specimen jars were full--a whole tray was filled with sample tubes containing an inky blue-black liquid, its surface as velvety as oil. Sealed into a tall upright gel canister was a strange glass cask, shaped almost like a shark's egg, half-full of the inky liquid.  
"They were studying something," Shepard whispered. "These weren't miners. They were scientists."  
"Who left in a hurry," Garrus said. He leaned over the terminal and tapped a few keys on the virtual keyboard. "They left everything on. We could probably get information we need from this."  
"Send everything you can back to the ship," Shepard said, without looking at him.  
Her eyes moved along the back of the room, past a waist-high partition between two computer workstations, to where a translucent white curtain barely concealed a large, huddled form laid out on one of the metal tables.  
"Commander? Ma'am?" Kaidan asked, but she looked at him and looked back at the huddle, before looking back at him again.  
He nodded; she walked past him, her eyes on the form.  
She had her weapon drawn and ready before she even swung around the curtain--and she was N7 trained, which meant she didn't jump and accidentally shoot, or jump backwards and run screaming, when she saw her target up close.  
"Vakarian--Alenko--" she said. Her mouth worked open and silent for a moment before she shook her head. "Come--come here."  
The huddle was a dead turian. Where his chest had been, there was a gaping hole of blasted-out viscera, raw edges of crumpled-out armor crinkled backwards like cheap aluminum sheeting. She could see his ribs had been cracked and shattered; the bone protruded through the ruined armor in more than one place.  
His big hands lolled off the table's sides, his sunken eyes open and rolled upwards. His face had hardened into a rictus of pain--wide mouth open, tongue gray-black with rot. Blood was coagulated in thick, ropy strands down the sides of his face. Big splatters of blood were everywhere--on the curtain, the floor, the ceiling. A track of turian footprints were smeared with it, leading away from the corpse.  
In the opposite direction of the footprints there was a long, curling streak--the kind of trail left by something that slithered.  
"What the--" Garrus said. "It looks like something...ate his internal organs out..."  
Kaidan said nothing, and when she looked at him, she saw he was ashen and sweating.  
She swallowed. "He looks as though he's been here for about a week. There's...there's not much in the way of insect life to speed decomposition, but...bacterial forms are more than compensating."  
"What--what do you think happened to him?" Kaidan asked.  
Shepard's mouth was a grim line, her eyes narrowed. In a dark corner of her mind she was thankful the suits had self-contained oxygen supplies; the ship's whole interior probably reeked of death and rot.  
"I don't know," she said, "Let's see if we can find who made these footprints, and ask them."  
~  
The middle door led back and into sleeping quarters that were empty, the floors strewn with bedding and clothing and shoes.  
"They sure as hell were in a hurry to get out of here," Garrus muttered.  
"Yeah, but how many of them were there? And what were they running from?" she said.  
~  
The left door led into a med-bay proper, where there were three bodybags stretched out on the contoured turian cots.  
The blood-track of footprints continued there, streaked and messy. The runner had been limping. Exhausted? Shepard wondered. Or injured?  
But she came around another partition--this one sectioning off a small private consulting room--where a dark-carapaced turian was slouched in a chair, a pistol on the floor just beneath her lax fingers. She was wearing a scientist's uniform, spattered with turian blood across the front.  
Shepard didn't have to turn her around to know what had made the blue-black splatter on the wall behind her.  
"I found someone. And something," Shepard said.  
The computer console on the desk in front of her was still on, the screen fluttering weakly.  
"She must have been the one who sent the distress call," Garrus said.  
"But then why kill herself immediately afterwards? She looks like she's been dead at least as long as the other turian." Kaidan muttered.  
"Something made it impossible for her to wait for help," Garrus continued. "Something...immediately dangerous."  
They were silent a moment, the ship silent around them--not the thrum of an engine core, the soft whirr of oxygen scrubbers--the silence unbroken and flattening.  
"There's no one else here, Commander..." Kaidan murmured. "We've searched the whole ship."  
She nodded, but didn't holster her shotgun. "Yeah. Let's go."  
~  
They were midway down the midship corridor when Garrus stopped suddenly, and swung the butt of his rifle against the wall paneling nearest himself.  
Which, once dented, swung open to reveal an elevator hatch, concealed behind a thin plating of wall panel.  
“How did you—” Kaidan said.  
"It has all kinds of other illegal modifications," Garrus said. "Why not have a hidden elevator?”  
He gestured at the floor with his rifle, at the corrosion-holes eaten in the floor plating.  
“Almost looks like they were sprinkling the stuff around like it was liquid air freshener,” Kaidan said, shaking his head.  
Garrus snorted. “  
"The controls have been blasted out. Again." Shepard said. "This seems too contained for a firefight. There didn’t seem to be blast damage to any other parts of the ship, either…”  
No one said anything, but Kaidan was almost certain that mo one was seriously entertaining mutiny as a real potential scenario anymore. There were too many pieces that did not fit.  
The elevator doors were as slow as those on the Normandy.  
He jumped slightly when the door was about waist-height, and by the time it was fully flush with the floor, he stood feeling like he was rooted to the spot, staring at the elevator's interior.  
Tacky dried splatters of green salarian blood were all over the elevator floor. A blue-black smear of turian blood streaked the floor and up the wall, but went nowhere.  
Everyone stepped into the elevator with their guns already raised and trained, Kaidan feeling a nervous itch building inside his collar.  
He glanced over at Shepard, and noticed her staring at the elevator's ceiling, her face slack with shock.  
He followed her stare--trailing the blue smear of turian blood up and up--to the blast-damaged ceiling. Someone had gotten off a few rounds with a rifle, but that was nothing in comparison to the hole messily ripped through the elevator's roof.  
"Thank your stars these things' hydraulics are on the bottom," Garrus said.  
"What do you think could’ve done that?" Kaidan was asking, without thinking.  
"Someone keep a weapon aimed at that at all times. Garrus, take us down."  
The elevator controls were covered with a smear of dried-on turian blood; Kaidan snatched his eyes away, his stomach clenching, and kept his gun trained on the hole in the ceiling.  
The edges of which, he noticed, had a strange melted look, directly next to where there was blast damage. Where there was a corona of scorched paneling from a shotgun blast, he could see that its center there were melt holes, the paneling dissolved and hanging in half-melted chunks. He shot three rapid glances at the floor directly beneath the blasts, and saw identical little corrosion-holes where the drips of melted paneling must have fallen.  
"Commander," he said, quietly, "Look."  
She glanced up at what he was looking at, her eyes widening.  
"More acid burns? How the hell did they get up there?"  
"I don't know," he said carefully, "But I doubt we're going to like what we find out."  
"Elevator's about to hit bottom," Garrus said, and then he was stepping back, raising his gun.  
The doors opened slowly, and with them they could feel all the heat leach out of the elevator.  
No one moved, at first.  
Immediately in front of the elevator was a huge puddle of krogan blood, smeared backwards and into the hold. A bloody krogan handprint, so perfectly preserved it looked like it had been pressed in wax, was wrapped around the frame of the elevator door.  
The cargo hold was silent, as well, the dim light filaments flickering weakly.  
A quick sweep brought them all the way to its back, past rows of containment cages with triple-thick carbon steel bars and steel mesh, all of them elevated on standing platforms.  
One of the cages' roofs had been punched out, the metal and mesh bent and twisted upwards by some titanic force.  
"Looks like they got off a few shots," Garrus said, gesturing at the walls of the cage, where there were holes blasted into the mesh.  
Kaidan looked at the floor beneath the cage, where he saw again a blotchy, uneven hole melted through the floor paneling. His stomach clenched again.  
There were also several of the roll-top crates--most overturned. Shepard opened a few, finding nothing but more specimen canisters, these containing sediment samples, the yellow-green liquid, and more of the black liquid.  
In the far back-wall, a hole big enough for a small child to slide through sideways had been melted into the floor. Here and there, frost grew in twisted veins on the floor paneling and up the corrugated wall plating. Beyond, they could all hear the half-muted noise of wind screamed past the ship.  
"Damn," Kaidan said.  
Shepard stepped up nearer to the hole, and leaned cautiously over.  
"It went all the way through the hull," she said quietly.  
They were all silent, standing in a tight knot in the center of the room. Kaidan was silently wishing they could be gone, wishing they were back aboard the Normandy and back in orbit, far away from this strange nightmare they'd walked into.  
"They weren't terraformers, these scientists," Shepard was continuing. "They came here to capture something to study it. And whatever they were studying got out..."  
Everyone was silent. 

"What the hell do you think happened?" Shepard muttered.  
She sat squirming in the driver's seat of the Mako, wringing her hands against the cold. She thumbed at the temperature controls, swearing softly under her breath and trying to convince her teeth to stop chattering.  
Beside her, Garrus shivered, silent, his mandibles locked tight against his face. He was scratching away at the built-up layer of ice on the faceplate of his helmet with one thumb.  
"I can't say, but whatever it was, it looked ugly."  
They were all trying to coax feeling back into their hands, shivering, while the cold winds slapped at the Mako's sides.  
"Thoughts, Alenko?" she asked, half-turning to look at him.  
"I...honestly can't say. I've never seen anything like that," he replied.  
He looked haunted. She made a mental note to have a long conversation with him as soon as the ordeal was over and they were back aboard the Normandy.  
"Hope this old bucket starts," she mumbled, and keyed the engine ignition code.

The universe was merciful, for once, Kaidan thought. He was flexing his hands in his gloves, trying to work the sensation of burning pins and needles out of his chilled hands.  
Around them, the Mako shuddered and jolted. Now and again, Shepard would make apologetic noises, but they were beyond blaming her: everyone had tried their hand at driving the damn thing, and it handled, as Joker had once put it, like a plastic crate taped to a pair of plastic kids' roller-skates.  
"Visibility's getting pretty bad," Shepard said. "That weather system wasn't supposed to move over this part of the area until later!"  
"That's the problem with these unstable little planetoids," Garrus muttered. "There's no such thing as stable weather."  
"Damn." and she was thumbing up the heating controls; Kaidan breathed a sigh of gratefulness.  
"How's the heat back there, Alenko?" Shepard called, over the noise.  
"Fine," he said, diplomatically. Then, drawing in a shuddering breath, he told the truth. "Actually--if you could just turn it up a little--"  
"Commander!" Garrus's hand was on her arm, and suddenly the Mako was shuddering to an abrupt halt.  
"Holy hell, what is that?"  
Kaidan leaned forward, pulling against his seat harness to see up and out through the Mako's windshield.  
Blinding gray-whiteness swirled beyond the windshield's pane; now and again, the wind would whip away flurries of the driven ice and he could see, before them, something half-buried in the snow.  
"Looks like another rover," Kaidan murmured.  
"Great. Garrus, what can you see from here? Any word on whether it's from the turian vessel?" Shepard asked.  
"If you can swing us around it, I could get a better look," Garrus said.  
Shepard was trying to coddle the Mako's finicky steering works, easing it closer to the huddle, when Garrus made a clipped, harsh noise.  
She hit the brakes.  
They were within arm's reach of the other rover, now--obviously of turian make.  
Its sides, windows, and windshield were all glazed over with thin sheet-ice. Snow was accumulated around it in shallow drifts that came halfway up its tires.  
"What's that?" Garrus said. "Look, the windows..."  
Kaidan very quickly retracted his thought about the universe being merciful.  
"Driver's side, broken. Windshield..." Shepard muttered, training the Mako's gun scope on it to see better, "Cracked in two places and severely compromised. Well, if anyone WAS trying to hide in there, they'd have frozen to death in just a few hours."  
"What happened?" Kaidan asked. "Why is their rover so far away from their ship?"  
"Maybe they were going back for whatever it was that they were researching," Shepard said. "More likely, though, I think they might have been trying to escape whatever had gotten loose on their ship."  
"Then how--what--" Kaidan could do nothing but wave his hand, his mouth open.  
"Garrus--" he tried again, "What kind of material do they use in the windows on rovers manufactured for turian use?"  
Garrus looked over his shoulder at him and tilted his head--turians lacking mobile eyebrows to lift.  
"The...same sort of glass that has been deemed safe for use on all rovers of this class--just regular layered aluminosilicate. Why?"  
"Because then we all know how hard it is to break these windows," Kaidan said.  
"I can't see any external damage to the rover implying that there was a firefight," Shepard said. She pulled around to its other side.  
"Oh," she said, and when Kaidan looked, he felt his insides turn to lead.  
There was a massive hole blasted in the driver's side window, a still-bright spatter of salarian blood glazing the rover's frozen side.  
"This looks bad," Kaidan said, then wanted to kick himself for blurting out the obvious.  
Shepard killed the Mako's engine.  
"Come on. Let's get a better look, see if we can't find something else out about this."  
He hung back and covered Garrus and the Commander, who advanced with guns drawn and ready. But it was only a moment before Shepard raised her hand; he came up beside them and stood staring into the vehicle through the hole.  
Inside was a bloodbath preserved in a freezer. In the passenger seat, a turian woman whose back had been ripped open from hip to collar-ring slumped over the dashboard.  
Behind her were two more turians, both slumped forward, one of them with gaping puncture wounds cut like cookie-cutouts out of his back.  
The third turian was half-gone, the only remains left being a few grisly knobs of spine, hips, and legs. Something had ripped him in half.  
Ice crystals carpeted the surfaces of all their bodies, glittering faintly, poisonously, in the light of Shepard’s gun scope.  
"Oh god," Kaidan whispered, shuddering, unable to look away.  
Garrus turned away, hissing into his helmet mic like an over-pressurized furnace.  
They climbed back into the Mako in silence.  
"Three more," she murmured. “Looks like the salarian managed to escape, but they wouldn’t have survived long, bleeding like that.”  
They were all silent. She sighed, shook her head.  
"Let's get to high ground and call Joker for evac. I'm liking this whole thing a lot less with every minute we spend here."  
But as they drove, the probability of finding high ground seemed to grow slimmer and slimmer. They had two near-misses where visibility was almost zero and Shepard was urging the Mako forward at tiny incrememnts--only to halt abruptly when she realized they were on the edge of some frozen crevasse.  
"The landscape is like a paper cutout of a snowflake," she muttered. "How far have we gotten? Vakarian, can you give us some idea--"  
"We've only gone about half a kilometer, Shepard--and our elevation isn't enough for Joker to draw a clear extraction target on us. And...according to this map--if it's correct, given our...less than optimal orientation right now...there's another ship, less than two hundred meters in front of us."  
"What?" Shepard and Kaidan spoke at once.  
Garrus looked between the two of them, and sighed. "It's not wrong! Unless we're facing the complete wrong direction and that's just the turian ship again," he said.  
He consulted the dashboard map, tilted his head slightly, and added, "Which it's not."  
"Damn! I can't see anything! A ship?" She threw on the brakes, and for a minute they listened to nothing but the sound of the wind, its bellowing and screaming overpowering the Mako's engine's quiet rumble.  
"Who do you think it is?" She asked quietly. "Who do you think we're dealing with? Slavers? Illegal animal transporters?"  
"It'd have to be the second one," Garrus said. "Though I hope they're in better condition than the turian...explorers."  
"Maybe the turians and salarians aboard the last ship were legitimate explorers, and these people were saboteurs or something. People who were after whatever they were studying," Kaidan suggested.  
"Doesn't make sense," Garrus countered. "If they were official explorers sanctioned by the Hierarchy, their vessel would be marked and their mission clearly stated. And it definitely wouldn't be that kind of bootlegged vessel they had back there."  
"None of this makes sense," Shepard pointed out. "I guess we'll just have to check up on this ship ourselves.  
They drove on, wind slapping the Mako around like it was a cheap toy. Shepard was doggedly keeping them straight, fighting the wind, the uneven terrain.  
Kaidan could see how far her hands were sunk into the foam padding of the steering wheel--how each of her fingers sat in its own pressure-formed groove.  
He admired her determination--her tenacity in the face of a nonsensical--but very obviously hostile--situation, to at least uncover what had happened, in the absense of survivors to save.  
He knew that, if there were survivors, she'd save them.  
He abridged the thought--they would save them. Most days he felt less like one of her crew and more like one of her limbs, strange as it was--and he didn't mind.  
"There," Garrus said, "Look!"  
And then all their eyes were on the windshield, straining to see past it.  
Shepard slacked off on the gas, pulling them slowly closer.  
The second ship seemed to emerge out of the swirling snow, its silhouette strange and stark against the mercury-colored sky.  
But where the first looked like it had been there only long enough to look like an accident, this one looked clearly abandoned, haunted: its hull encased in ice, prow bearded with icicles that he could see were as thick as a man's arm.  
The struts of its landing gear were buried in drifts of snow so deep it brushed the ships' icicle-bristling undercarriage. Beneath the ice it might have been black, or dark gray, its shape unlike anything else Shepard had ever seen.  
"What the...Vakarian, is that...?" Shepard said.  
"That's not turian," Garrus said. "Not salarian, not krogan...Shepard, I don't know what that is."  
"Joker? Joker, this is Shepard. Do you read?"  
Silence. Then, "--er--is--can't--holding--orbit--"  
She sighed, bracing one hand against her forehead.  
"If we can't even talk to them, there's no way in hell they can lift us out of here. Much less get a clear enough picture of that vessel to tell us who made it."  
"I think another pertinent question would be when," Garrus pointed out.  
"Weather systems like this are unstable and not constant. The ice buildup we're looking at could be from overnight, or...over dozens of nights."  
"Hundreds of nights," Kaidan whispered. "That's not the kind of freeze you get unless something has been there awhile."  
They both looked at him, Garrus with narrowed eyes and Shep with wide.  
He continued, "I grew up in Vancouver, in Canada. I...had relatives who lived up farther north. Things get pretty cold up there, and when they freeze hard..." He looked back at the other ship, inclining his head. "Those icicles aren’t from one partial-melt and re-freeze. Look how thick they are—they grew slowly. They’ve been there awhile. If they were recent, their hanging angles would be affected by wind-direction. I’d say that ship has been here for years."  
"Hm. Well, time to go see if anyone is still home." 

The ship's cargo hold hatch was down--a recent development, Kaidan could tell, because the snowdrifts had been raked away, forming a small clearing. But the wind and snow were rapidly erasing it; already the clearing was half-full.  
Shepard eased the Mako to an unsteady halt at the clearing's edge, and they all hopped out into snow that was thigh-deep.  
Stiff-legged they waded through the snow--which was closer in texture to slivered ice, he thought--to the gangplank formed by the dropped cargo hatch.  
The hold was mostly empty, save for a few storage crates. At its far end, a blast door built unlike any he'd ever seen. Embossed on the doors' brushed-metal surface was a company logo--a trio of triangles surrounded by three bars on each side--the words beneath half-obscured with accumulated frost.  
The lock panel had been partially disassembled.  
"Hm. Looks like they had a hard time getting in," Shepard said.  
"Frankly I'm surprised they didn't just shoot it," Garrus said. "They certainly seemed fond of using that tactic on their own ship."  
Kaidan had a sudden uncomfortable prickle of realization.  
"All the blasted-out locks were on the outside," he said. "In the turian ship, all the locks were shot from the outside. They were--the crew was trying to run from something, trying to keep it in the ship while they tried to escape..."  
They were all silent.  
Shepard shook her head. "And they still didn't make it. Whatever it was chased them down in the rover and killed them anyway."  
After a moment she sighed and straightened from the lock-panel.  
"...Weyland Corporation," he murmured. Then, almost apologetically, he added, "Commander? What's wrong?"  
"This lock isn't standard--any standard. I don't even know how to begin to approach cracking that; the program is completely unfamiliar. I'm saving a duplicate of it. Maybe Joker can crack it."  
And speaking of the devil with the intent of him appearing, they all heard a crackle start up in their helmet comms.  
“Commander Sh—pard—is—Joker—do you read?”  
“Joker? Joker!”  
“Boy, Commander, am I glad to hear you. I’m looking at one hell of an ugly storm about to slap its big paw down on top of you. If you want evac, head back the way you came! It’s down-wind of the big snowstorm!” Joker’s voice, alternately frazzled with static and perfectly clear, was like a lifeline. Kaidan latched onto it mentally and held on.  
He turned to see Shepard, grinning in her helmet, nodding.  
“We’ll be at the highest point we can find. Thanks for staying on the line, Joker!” 

Shepard watched Garrus take a bite of the green bar he was eating. When he caught her, he twitched his mandibles twice and she looked away fast, feeling a tickle start in her stomach.  
It was hours later, after more harrowing time in the Mako, fighting uphill against the vicious wind, before Joker had a clear enough draw on their signal to pick them up.  
They were all sitting around the table for debriefing, Kaidan with his hands wrapped around a mug of coffee, trying (unsuccessfully) not to look visibly frozen, and herself still playing professional, her own hands only loosely cupping her mug. Her hands still felt frozen; she knew it was in her head, but it felt like her bones were ice, were frost-crusted metal.  
"Commander?" Liara was saying. Concern was written across her face. "You were saying, about the mission?"  
Shepard sighed, shaking her head before she continued.  
"There was no fight. We think the distress signal was a last-ditch call from one of the...explorers. But when we got inside the ship, there was no one left alive to save." Shepard gestured, feeling a little helpless.  
"Explorers?" Liara asked. "You mean...they were not miners?"  
Shepard shook her head, and glanced again at Garrus.  
"No, they weren't. That may be the shell of a mining vessel, but it's all been hollowed out and refitted. Looks like whoever had it didn't want anyone asking any questions about what they were doing out here." Garrus said. And he was picking green crumbs off the front of his armor with what Shepard thought was greatly exaggerated attention.  
"That still doesn't explain the presence of the human vessel. I did some research on this Weyland corporation. They are a human corporation, yes?"  
"Yes, based on Earth. They specialize in advances in cybernetics and bioengineering." Shepard said.  
"Yes, I discovered this. But I was confused as to why one of their ships would be this far out in human space...also, I was unable to discover the classification of that vessel, or the type. It is unlabeled, un-numbered, and unregistered, either with the human fleet or any other." She continued, ticking points off on her fingers of the hand in her lap.  
"Anyone else got anything?" Shepard asked, and looked around the table.  
Wrex kept on eating the bowl of mystery-‘meat’ he had. Tali'zorah was making the white crackers she had into a little tower. Garrus finished his green snack-bar and dusted his hands off. Ashley finished her meal and pushed her tray away. Kaidan hung his head and finally spoke.  
"Isn't it the Weyland-Yutani group?"  
"Yeah. That Japanese cybernetics corporation, Yutani, bought them after the owner and primary shareholder of the Weyland corporation up and disappeared. Everyone thought old man Weyland was a loon because he kept going on about the stars and how they contained the secrets of all life. No one laughed anymore when he and his daughter just...vanished." Ashley crossed her arms and straightened in her seat. "They were never found, either."  
Shepard nodded. "Yeah, that's a perennial favorite on the news. No one can pretend it was aliens who 'abducted' them anymore, either. So of course all the tabloids have been scrambling to come up with something else to explain it. The story’s going on sixty years old, but still crops up every now and then, every time someone finds an old human derelict floating in the middle of nowhere."  
"All right, but what's a ship--marked with only the Weyland insignia--doing out here? How long ago was that merger? And just look at the ship--it's definitely pre-Alliance-regulation. Which means that ship was built pre-contact--which means they couldn't have uses mass effect relays to get here--which means they must have spent one hell of a long time in space." Garrus said.  
"Weyland was experimenting with cryo-technology for a long time beforehand anyway. They were the first company to make freezing yourself possible and affordable. Made it easy for people with fatal illnesses to pause death long enough for doctors to find a cure or treatment regimen. But come to think of it, I didn't even know they had a spacefaring division back then. So that doesn't make any sense," Shepard said.  
"Like I was saying," Garrus nodded, "The ship's been here a lot longer than that. It has to have been."  
"Which leaves us with only technical questions," Liara spoke. "Like what they were doing here in the first place."  
"Well, whatever the second crew was doing, they're not doing it anymore," Kaidan said. He took a gulp of coffee and set the mug back down, his movements careful and stiff. "They're all dead."  
"We don't know that," Shepard said. "We only conclusively saw eight bodies. A vessel that size must have had a crew to staff it. We have to find them and find out what happened, and help whoever we can. All right?"  
There was silence. Garrus was the first one to speak, one hand on the tabletop, and nod at Shepard.  
"At your side, Commander. Just say the word."


	2. Exposure

The next morning, the first person Shepard spoke with was Liara.  
The asari had politely requisitioned a corner of Dr. Chakwas' office, where she had set up her own computer in addition to the console that was already there. Scattered over the brushed-alloy tabletop there were several data-tablets, some with windows open and displaying information and graphs about Prothean ruins and technology.  
But at the moment, Liara was sitting leaned slightly forward, her chin propped in one palm and her eyes glued to the orange screen in front of her. Every so often she would pause and remember to scoot back--but in moments she was leaning forward again, wide-eyed, chewing slightly at the inside of her bottom lip. Judging by the several empty white resin cups scattered around the tablets near her, she probably hadn't slept at all the previous night.  
Shepard smiled a little, and knocked on the wall next to where she stood.  
"Morning. Mind if I ask you a few questions?"   
"Oh! Commander! Actually, I would like that. I'm very glad you came to speak to me before going out today."  
"Sounds like you found something interesting," Shepard said. "Shoot."  
"Er, well. I think we're rapidly going to gain more insight into why the turian explorers were here. Faster, certainly, than anything we may learn about the human ship," the said.   
She was still skimming through the reports that Garrus had sent from the turian scientist's computer back on their vessel.   
"What have you found out about them? Can you tell me how long they were there?"  
"According to the log you sent me, they were here for thirty days, before…things began to go wrong. The log was saved only seven days prior to Joker’s intercepting their distress hail.”  
Shepard nodded, and Liara continued, “They appear to have been independently funded, and they...appear to have landed, actually, to search and…recover…any valuables from the human ship."  
Shepard frowned slightly.  
"I thought the terminal whose data Garrus sent had you belonged to their medical officer," she said.  
"Oh, I have no doubt that some of this information did come from a medical--or other science--officer. But...everything is rather garbled, thrown together. The last report reads almost like a last will and testament. As to the medical conditions of the crewmembers...this person was certainly not a medical doctor. A researcher, most definitely. I have spent all night reading about what they think the human crew of the first ship was doing. They appear to have found some ruins."  
Shepard's eyebrows rose. "Ruins? Prothean?"  
Liara's face was clouded as she glanced back at the report she was reading.  
"They...do not say."  
"Hmm. Well, please make sure to tell me if you find out anything conclusive."  
"Yes..." she murmured, "Of course, Commander."  
But as Shepard was turning to leave, Liara straightened and turned in her chair.  
"Commander, if it is not too forward of me to ask...may I accompany you as a member of the squad on the next away mission?"  
"Your insight would be a great asset. It's a done deal," Shepard said.  
~  
"These do not look like any of the other Prothean ruins we have uncovered," Liara said.  
It wasn't the first time she made the remark.  
They stood just outside the Mako, staring at two rows of eight huddled, low hills--each one perfectly cone-shaped. They could plainly see that the hills nearest them--a mere three hundred yards off and down the hillside--seemed to levitate above the ground, leaving a margin of black shadow beneath their bases.   
"And yet, look. Look at the rows, the evenness, the precision...these are certainly not a standard geographical feature." Liara said.  
"Just because it's strange doesn't mean it might not become familiar if we take a closer look," Shepard said. “There’s always someone discovering a new type of rock formation.”  
She tried to tell herself that the knot of tension that had replaced her stomach was just pre-encounter jitters and not a sense of doom--of foreboding.  
Memories of a far world, of an entire squad dead around her and herself alone, stranded, rose up like tar bubbles in her mind.  
Everything felt wrong.   
She tried to tell herself that it was just the way she always felt before really beginning a mission.  
It didn't work.

They discovered that the hills seemed to be levitating because they were suspended all the way around, at regular intervals, by massive rectangular stones, the blocks cut with incredible precision from pale-gray rock.   
These rectangular stones were each some twelve feet tall by about one hundred feet, by Shepard’s crude estimate—easily big enough for them to comfortably walk beneath the massive cone of rock above them.   
Liara was the one who found the tunnel, motioning them over with excitement.  
They descended into warm, humid darkness, their guns' lights sweeping mercury-colored wafers of visible areas out of the pitch-blackness.  
Shepard's hands ached on the sides and grip of her shotgun. She wanted her sniper rifle; she wanted the safety of her scope between herself and whatever was lurking down there in the sticky darkness--  
They came to a doorway. It opened up like a smooth, lipless mouth in the wall to their left--a wall she quickly realized was not stone, but some gray-bronze-colored metal or alloy, rimed with dirt of ages.  
She swallowed. Her tongue felt thick in her mouth.  
While she was internally explaining to herself, quite calmly, that it was the sight of all the dead crewmembers of the turian vessel that was wearing on her nerves, Garrus took point, scouting the doorway.  
"Looks clear," he muttered, and then the beige-and-green of his camo armor passed out of the moon-white circle of her lights.   
She and Liara followed next, Liara almost tiptoeing with barely-suppressed excitement. Shepard wanted to tell her to relax; whoever had lived here had been dead a very long time, and there was little danger a heavy footfall would wake them.  
"My helmet's telling me there's breathable oxygen in here," Garrus said, after awhile of walking in silence.  
"That's...that shouldn't be possible! The atmosphere outside is--well, it is not toxic, per se, but it certainly isn't breathable," Liara said. “The oxygen content is so low you’d pass out in moments.”  
"I'm just telling you what my helmet is saying," Garrus huffed.  
"Mine's saying the same thing, Vakarian. Don't worry--it isn't a malfunction. No need to go back to the ship and re-calibrate the helmet's scanners," Shepard said, and she supposed she had pitched her tone right, because he chuckled.  
"My helmet is also informing me--but this simply cannot be an accurate reading," Liara said.   
"We'll play it safe. Our helmets can't all be malfunctioning, or we'd all be dead from hypoxia," Shepard said. "But just because the air might be breathable, it doesn't mean there couldn't be any airborne contaminants. The hoods stay up, people."  
They walked for some time in the still, humid darkness, their helmet sensors not picking up so much as a blip.   
What little they could see of the walls revealed weird corrugated texture, resembling ribs arching over the slightly-concave floor. For a short time they simply walked, sweeping the walls and floor with their scopes, Shepard keeping hers trained forward. She noticed the corridor had begun curving lightly to their right, and beneath her feet, had acquired a slight downwards tilt.  
"Everything looks more organic than manufactured…this is the strangest structure I have ever been inside," Liara murmured. And then, "Oh!"  
They all paused, Shepard taking two steps backwards without looking away from her scope's light-circle.  
"What is it?" she asked.  
"There's some sort of protrusion here. Look," she said.  
Shepard nodded at Garrus, who took point, and she turned back around to see what Liara was talking about.  
There, at about shoulder-height, was an oval panel on one of the raised sections of wall. In it, there were three or so horizontal niches, each with an accompanying symbol beside it.  
"Any ideas on what language that is, Dr. T'Soni?" Shepard whispered.  
"I have extensively studied ancient Prothean, and I am also fairly proficient with ancient Asari. This...is neither," she replied, her voice low and breathy.  
"Commander," Garrus said, his voice tight.  
"I wonder what the marks say...I am so glad I had the foresight to activate my helmet video-cameras, just for this purpose..." Liara continued.  
"Commander," Garrus said, louder, and Shepard looked away from Liara.  
"Yes, Vakarian?"  
“I'm picking up movement--"  
"Commander, I think..." Liara's voice, over all their comms, and then a soft, lambent green light erupted along the central ridge in the ceiling, trails of tiny greenish nodes all lighting up and spreading.  
Shepard was down in a crouch, gun trained up at the ceiling, before even thinking.  
"I...I think it's all right, Commander," Liara said. "I think I just turned on the lights."  
"Movement," Garrus said again, his voice low.  
Shepard straightened, stepping up beside him silently.  
"How far off?"  
"...around the corner," Garrus said, and Shepard felt her veins burn, her heart thudding almost painfully. Her mouth watered, her tongue feeling absurdly thick.  
"Dr. T'Soni, please stay close."  
Then they were moving down the hall, quickly. They could see, now, that it was shaped like the innards of some massive living creature. Shepard felt like they'd been swallowed and were marching through something's gullet, and her mind raced ahead, picking out details she'd have loved to study, back in school: how the structure seemed to be fitted together with no noticeable joins, screws, bolts, or anything else; the strange bruise-color of the walls, the silver-gray of the raised ribs.  
"I...I'm not sure who built this...the more time we are here, the more certain I am that these ruins are not Prothean, and certainly not Asari..." Liara continued. As they jogged, she was staring hard at the strange, shell-like curvature of the walls, her hand skating in the air inches away from the surface.  
"This vessel is almost a work of art...it looks as if it had been grown, rather than built."  
"It might not be such a good idea to start touching things, doctor," Garrus said. "The architecture doesn't exactly look user-friendly...and if it wasn't the Protheans, then who built this? Who else was even capable of this? When their empire disappeared, most other races were still running around stabbing one another with sharp sticks, and living in caves!"  
Shepard gave him a look. He gave her a look of contrition that was so blatantly false that she could have laughed.  
"Who could this have been, indeed?" Liara continued, "This is incredible!"  
"Status on that movement, Vakarian?"  
"Still tapering off. They're moving fast."  
They came suddenly into a large, open chamber, the ceiling arching up and overhead. Dim whitish light filtered down from somewhere above, illuminating the room with a milk-colored sickly light. Recessed in the walls they saw three circular openings--doors--each one showing dark interiors.  
"Which way, Vakarian?" Shepard asked.  
Garrus looked around, touching one hand to the sniper’s scope on his eye. But after two passes, he shook his head.  
"Lost them. I'd say...middle door's our best bet."  
~  
They stumbled, coming through the doorway: for some reason, the lower edge was raised by about three inches. Inside, the floor was weird and curved beneath their feet, the walls narrowed.   
"The--the walls are coated with some kind of slime--" Liara said. Fear was climbing into her voice.  
"Step away from the walls,” Shepard said, her voice tense and low. The persistent sense of wrongness was climbing her spine like icy hands. “Don't touch anything."   
Here, the light was dimmer--overhead, the ceiling had been partially obscured with what looked like layers and layers of translucent resin; drifts of the stuff, purple-black and apparently almost rock-hard, had accumulated on the walls. Its surface was slick-wet and smooth looking, with strange ridges and striations in it, rises, divots and protrusions in uneven, wicked-looking formations.   
There was no way, she realized, that this part of the ship had been built this way.   
"Status on that movement, Vakarian?" Shepard demanded.  
"Two meters. To our right."   
They rounded a corner, the light even dimmer but for the sweep of their scopes, and then Shepard froze in her tracks.  
A row of people was encased in some kind of resin-cartilage on the walls--six gaunt, skeletal salarians, long dead, and a single krogan--their chests blown open, their ribcages hollowed and empty. The krogan looked to have gone down with a fight. Something had gouged out both his eyes messily, the flesh of the ruined sockets messy and ragged. Orange blood streaked his face and the front of his body, and part of his face bad been melted away, corroded flesh eaten down to the bone.  
"Oh--oh--" Liara kept saying, her voice tiny.   
"There," Garrus said, and threw his scope up, at the very end.   
More figures plastered to the walls—four turians, all with erupted ribcages, one female partially eaten from the waist down, gnawn exoskeleton chewed away and bare, raw bone left of her hips, her legs. The man nearest them had been completely disemboweled, ropy entrails spilling onto the floor in front of him. The entrails looked as though they had been messily chewed at the trailing end.  
A single figure hung suspended in a partial cocoon of the cartilage-resin at the end of the row--a thin pair of legs, one badly gashed and poorly healed, with clotted green blood tacky down its length. Plastered inside the cocoon was a salarian man, head lolling, wide black eyes rolling in a delirium of agony and confusion.  
"We've got a live one!" Shepard said, and rushed over to him.  
"No--no--no--" the salarian was whimpering, his teeth clacking together hard.  
"Quick--Liara, help me pull him down!" Shepard was already slinging her gun over her shoulder, whipping out her omni-tool. Liara was beside her a moment later with her own.  
But the salarian flinched away, a strangled shriek escaping his lips.  
"Don't--don't cut me--down--get out--GET OUT!" he screamed.  
"He's delirious. Come on, we have to get him medical attention--" Shepard was slicing into the webbing of cartilage spanning his torso, peeling it back, and together she and Liara peeled off the gummy mess holding him against the wall.  
He slumped to the floor, groaning, hoarse.  
"Stop," he said, "Stop. Get away from--get away--GET AWAY FROM ME!"  
"Take it easy! We're here to help," Shepard said. "Can you tell me who did this to you?"  
"YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND! YOU HAVE TO GET AWAY!" he screamed.   
His hands came up and grabbed at her shoulders, his grip fever-strong and twitching.  
A moment later he clutched at his throat, then his chest, and fell back retching until he vomited--a sudden jet of pale greenish-white fluid. He lolled backwards against the wall, groaning, his breath hitching sharply.  
"Come on, let's get him up," Shepard said. She pulled one of his arms over her shoulder--with him trying feebly to yank it away--and struggled upright.  
"Garrus, cover us--" she was saying, when she saw a section of wall behind Liara shift and move.  
The creature looked almost like a turian--thinner--with too many fingers on the clawed hand that was reaching for Liara. And its head was smooth as a bullet, so, so sleek, an eyeless face with mandibles barely covering teeth like silver needles.   
Shepard's arm whipped up and she unloaded part of a clip into its chest, sending it reeling backwards into the wall, screaming.  
Liara dropped into a crouch, reaching for her own gun, and then Garrus was behind her, talking, then shouting--  
The salarian doctor was weeping, begging, trying to pull away from her.  
"Let's move!" she shouted, and was running, half-dragging, half-carrying the salarian.  
Back into the hall, they ran, with the walls lunging out at them as they passed, the nodes and striations shifting suddenly into--  
Another of the creatures, this one leaning into their path. And she saw it had a tail like a chain of exposed vertebrae, a single knifelike point on the end.  
She had time sidestep its vicious stab, her shield blurring blue where it grazed into her perimeter space, and she was putting herself between the injured salarian and the thing when Liara crushed it to a pulp against the wall. Shepard had enough time to register more screaming, and to see that the thing was still twitching--  
Then Garrus was urging her forward, yelling, and they were stumbling out into the open chamber.  
She was the one who noticed the scuttling on the ceiling.   
Another one of the things, this one smaller, with stick-thin wiry limbs, dropped down in front of them. Its head--sleek and weirdly long--terminated at its end in two vicious-looking little peaks--the pads of its fingers splayed and spoon-shaped like a gecko's. Its lips slithered back off its teeth, and it opened its mouth--  
Or started to, before she shot at it.  
It scuttled out of her way like she was a rookie cadet at her first shooting gallery, with her trying frantically to keep it in her sights.   
She saw it run up the wall, almost faster than she could move her arm, and then she could hear the boom of Garrus' sniper rifle. There was a muted scream from somewhere above their heads.  
Over her shoulder, she saw Garrus reloading his sniper rifle, stepping nearer to her. Then he fired again, the boom deafening in the close quarters.  
The darkness in front of them erupted, splattering green. Something in front of them shuddered.   
And then she heard the roar.  
A thing that looked like a melted krogan was rushing towards them, its eyeless bone-ridged bullet of a head low to the ground. The ridges of its armored dorsal carapace bristled with spines, each razor-sharp edge glittering in the dull greenish light.  
Shepard shot it, watched her shots ricochet off its back, watched it continue to advance without flinching or slowing. She began to take a step back, snatching her pistol as her assault rifle overheated.  
One of Garrus’ shots had blown out a meaty chunk of its neck--exposing greenish flesh she could see so clearly--as the thing reared back, and came down on top of her with paws like a lion's. White-hot pain erupted through her left shoulder.  
She had enough thought to shove the salarian away from her. Then she was hitting the wall, still firing. Her gun was so hot it was burning her hand through the ferroceramic plating of her glove, and she knew she had seconds before it overheated.  
She thought it was trying to headbutt her--but when it reared its head back again, she saw it open its jaws--flexing them rapidly--and its tongue was like a segmented silver tentacle slick with mucous--its end opening into more rows of teeth--  
She rammed the point of her pistol in the bubbling, meaty hole in its neck and pulled the trigger until the gun overheated, yellow-green blood bubbling out of its neck. Splatters rained all over her chest. The krogan-creature screamed and lunged back, its movements gone jerky and spasmodic. She scrambled to her feet, aiming her pistol again, only to see it dissolving in her hand, the barrel corroding where it was spattered with the thing's blood.  
"Commander!" Liara's voice, and Shepard flung the ruined pistol down and whipped her shotgun over her shoulder.   
The thing swung its tail at her—the blade heavier than the small one's--and she ducked, the tail-blade sinking into the wall-cartilage above her head.  
She plugged it twice in the back, the thing still clawing at her, and once more as a direct shot to its face.   
Garrus was a blur of motion moving past her, down the hallway they'd come through, and when she'd looked around, she saw Liara in the doorway, lifting one of the things to fling it backwards into two others who were advancing along the corridor.  
The air was full of the creatures' rising, sharp screams.  
She bent over and helped up the salarian--who was hyperventilating with terror--and began moving down the hallway, after Garrus, moving as fast as the added weight of the injured salarian would allow her.   
Then they were out, out into the stone tunnel, the salarian wheezing and vomiting against her side--  
"You're going to be fine," she said, her voice steady, though she was panting, "We're going to help you. Everything is going to be fine. We're going to be very, very cold for a little while, and then we'll get you aboard our ship and get you help. You're going to be fine," she said to him.  
She wondered how long she'd have to say it to believe it herself.  
And then the pale sunlight--beautiful, beautiful sunlight--and then she and Garrus were sprinting towards the Mako, with him turning to spot her for cover every so often, and her dragging the injured salarian almost bodily. Garrus was limping, half-foundering in the deep snow. She saw him nearly fall and recover himself, running on. Her left arm felt strange—too light, and the fingers of her hand were starting to go clammy-cold in her glove. She tightened her grip on her gun and ran, not looking back.  
Then she was half-helping the salarian into the Mako and half-throwing him into it, Garrus already inside. She slammed the door-hatch and slapped at the engine engage switches, training the guns on the entrance they'd just come from, and she was barely breathing.  
"--MMANDER! SHEPARD!"   
"What?" she said, her voice high, barely more than a breath.  
She turned to look at Garrus, who was staring at her, his mandibles twitching so hard they clattered against his teeth.  
"Dr. T'Soni," he said, his voice thin and tight.   
"Oh my god," she whispered. Her hand was on the door-latch even as she spoke, "We have to go back--"  
But he grabbed her arm, pulling her back into her seat. His grip was like a vise.  
"Shepard, your arm," he said. "You armor--"  
And she looked down at herself, her mouth coming open to defend herself.  
The left shoulder-plate of her armor had been completely ripped off, down to the reinforced synth-silk under-armor. Gashes radiated downwards and in, across her breastplate. --The breastplate, which was pitted and scarred, the outer enamel eaten away where the thing's blood had splashed her.  
"You're bleeding," Garrus said, his voice low, and she realized that the synth-silk was stuck to her skin with her own blood.  
The strange coolness of her left arm, she realized, with a floating sense of clinical detachment, was probably because there was blood pooling inside her under-armor, next to her skin.  
She sucked in a deep, shuddering breath, and exhaled fast enough to fog her helmet visor.  
"We have to go back up. Assemble another away-team--"  
"Commander--"  
"The salarian needs help--we have to--"  
"Commander!" Garrus said. "Look."  
And finally she did, craning herself around in her seat, despite the tearing pain in her shoulder.  
The salarian was slumped in the backseat where she's pushed him, mouth slack and eyes wide, his huge pupils dilated.  
"...he must have died of shock," Garrus said.  
She paused a moment, staring at him hard.  
He twitched slightly—his torso shivering slightly.  
“Garrus,” Shepard said, low and careful, “Open the hatch.”  
“What? But—”  
“Do it.” she didn’t look at him, aiming her rifle one-handed at the salarian.  
Whose corpse was doing a strange, jerky dance—the torso shuddering. There was a sickening crackle of snapping bone and tearing cartilage and, a dark green stain spreading across the front of the salarian’s chest, and Shepard felt her veins shoot full of ice.   
“NOW!” she yelled, and Garrus kicked the hatch on his side open.  
The thing clawed its way out of his shirt—an eyeless, pus-colored worm with a head the size of a human hand, silver needles for teeth, its squeal like broken machinery. Her shot was dead-on, and blew the bulbous head most of the way off its body. Yellow-green blood sprayed everywhere, and Garrus, swearing, slung the salarian’s body out of the car with the butt of his sniper rifle.  
Shepard gunned the engines.  
“We’re going aboard the ship to clean ourselves up. Then we’re coming back to get Liara.”  
Neither of them spoke about the smell of melted plastic. Neither of them spoke at all, until they were back aboard the ship, with Wrex exclaiming over the state of her armor and Dr. Chakwas herding her into the med-bay to treat her for severe lacerations and acid burns.


End file.
